Talk:Timeline of Interstellar/@comment-2.24.81.243-20150519001240
The only flaw I can see in this is during the 60 years or so period when Cooper goes into the Wormhole, and Brand carries on to Edmunds planet. In your version, you have humanity, via the stations, hanging around the wormhole, hoping to discover other solar systems and prepare to rescue the Lazarus and Endurance crews. If this was correct, in those 60 years, humanity surely would have made it to Edmunds planet before Brand. Now we can agree that it would take several decades to build the stations, notably the one near Saturn. But it's only several months travel from the exit of the wormhole to the furthest planet. They've been orbiting Saturn for a minumum of two years as indicated by Murph's journey as an old woman. You're assuming all the ships in Cooper station are still preparing, but what exactly are they waiting for and how long have they been waiting? They've got the thumbs up, even if this doesn't fully indicate that the planets are habitable (as we saw during the movie) it categorically states that travel through the wormhole is not only possible, it's quite safe. So why haven't they gone? 1) They couldn't go through the wormhole. It took them this long to build the ships capable of traversing the wormhole, Cooper arrived back at the station at the cooincidental moment they were finally ready to proceed. Hard to believe that with the minimum of two years, the ability to send ships back and forth from Earth, and the relative ease in which they found the floating Cooper, they didn't even have ships or pilots that could try? 2) They didn't want to go through the wormhole. Fear, disinterest or similar prevented them from continuing the mission. Humanity after all, is secure now on the stations, they don't really need a last ditch, desperate gamble anymore. They could have accepted that the Lazarus and Endurance missions Plan B was a failure. This along with 1) aren't mutually exclusive, together they make a convincing argument. 2) There was nobody left to go through the wormhole. It's not a single, closed time loop. In that Cooper created an alternate timeline when he relayed the quantum data back to Murph. When he exited Gargantua, he appeared in the new, altered timeline. The Brand that we see on Edmund's planet is the one from the old universe, the people of Earth all died, and she is destined to rebuild the species alone. When Cooper arrives in the new timeline, he, like us, assumes the rest haven't gone through yet, but they very well might have, rescued Brand, and started building on Edmunds planet, we just don't get to see it. Perhaps, but it would rely on Brand's colony from the original universe being the ones that built the wormhole, and if this was the case, why the need to meddle with things enough to create an alternate timeline to save your ancestors by showing Cooper the Tesseract? The fifth dimension beings exist, humanity survived, it serves no real purpose other than altruism. Not completely unbelievable I suppose. But there is the problem that hip-hopping across timelines to show Brand at the end would be confusing as hell, especially if Cooper is on his way to rescue a different Brand entirely. 3) The writers never thought about it. It's just something they never considered. In all the rush of plot about time dilation, they simply forgot that there's a large span of time to play with, and by not using a little exposition, they unintentionally left it up to the viewer's imagination. Nailed it.